u/History86

A year ago, if you had asked me what good SEO looked like for a B2B SaaS company, I would probably have given a pretty standard growth answer.

Own a category.
Build landing pages.
Create structured content around a set of high-intent keywords.
Rank.
Convert.

And for years, that worked.

But over the last few months something started happening inside our own company that made me realize the internet is changing much faster than most of us think.

We started seeing inbound demo requests coming from the US, which is ironic, because the US was not even our target market yet. Some of these leads referenced positioning we had barely pushed through paid channels. Others arrived unusually educated about our category before the first call had even happened.

At first I thought this was coincidence.

Then I attended a session at a local conference, and the framework presented suddenly gave language to what we were already seeing happen in practice:

“In the answer. In the mind. In the wallet.”

And I think this is the clearest explanation yet of how AI-driven discovery is changing B2B marketing.

The first phase is “In the answer.”

This is the discovery layer. When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude:
“What’s the best attribution platform for B2B SaaS?”
or
“What’s the best EV for fleet management?”

…are you even present in the generated answer?

Not ranked. Mentioned.

Because increasingly, users are not browsing ten blue links anymore. They are consuming synthesized shortlists.

But what became really interesting for us is what happened after that.

The second phase is “In the mind.”

This is where the model, and the buyer, starts building trust.

The LLM starts checking:
- comparisons
- Reddit threads
- implementation stories
- YouTube reviews
- LinkedIn opinions
- technical discussions
- customer sentiment

And this is where they told something extremely important:

every single week, the channel with the most impact changed, for different brands in different markets.

One week it was Reddit.
Another week it was LinkedIn.
Then suddenly YouTube started driving conversations.
Sometimes a founder post performed better than an SEO page.
Sometimes a technical explanation outperformed polished marketing copy.

There was no consistent “winning channel.”

The impact was highly contextual to where that specific audience went to validate trust.

And I think this is where many companies still misunderstand “AI SEO.”

They are looking for the new Google ranking formula.

I increasingly believe there isn’t one.

Because LLMs are not just indexing websites. They are synthesizing reputation across the internet.

That means the question is no longer:
“How do I rank for this keyword?”

The question becomes:
“What does the internet collectively believe about my company in this context?”

That is a much bigger game.

And it changes how you think about content entirely.

SEO used to reward structured content about a few important things.

LLMs seem to reward contextual depth about everything.

Not just:
- product pages
- category pages
- blogs

But:
- operational nuance
- implementation detail
- objections
- comparisons
- community discussions
- sentiment
- workflows
- integrations
- technical credibility
- founder expertise

The third phase is “In the wallet.”

This is where the user is no longer asking:
“What exists?”

They are asking:
“What should I actually buy?”

And what fascinates me is that this stage increasingly appears to be influenced long before the buyer ever visits your website.

The model already shaped the shortlist.
The internet already shaped the trust.
Your website is often just confirming the decision.

That realization completely changed how we think about marketing at our SaaS company.

We stopped obsessing purely over traffic acquisition.

And started thinking much more deeply about narrative consistency across the web.

So now we are going to build about a 1000 pages answering every random query fanout an LLM can come up with.

To be continued!